Faced with contemporary art, there are on the one hand the grumblers, convinced that art is dead, or uninteresting, or, worse, carnivalesque and in the process of disappearing in an ultimate and derisory parade.

The alternative was allowing the tax grumblers to continue imagining themselves as bold truth-tellers brave enough to publicly observe that paying taxes is an unpleasant burden foisted on the public (for no good reason, mind you). afs

Little did the grumblers know that a half-century later, the fine arts would have all but vanished from the commercial networks—and would be increasingly hard to find on PBS, the noncommercial network that was originally founded in part to give high culture a safe haven.

But the third she has in hand, as Baroness Ashton has apparently written to one of the grumblers, Pierre Lellouche, a junior minister in the Sarkozy government, to confirm that she will take a rapid residential course to improve her grasp of Europe's second most dominant language.